Saturday, 20 July 2013

Number of breweries 1898 - 2000

Time for some more random statistics. Rather incomplete ones, but still of educational value.

First off, it's the number of breweries per country.What's most obvious is the huge number of breweries in Germany at the end of the 19th century. Those figures don't even cover the whole of Germany: Baden and Alsace-Lorraine are missing. All told, there must have been more than 20,000 breweries.

You can also see that time was crueller to Belgium and France in terms of brewery number reduction, while in the UK and Bavaria brewery numbers had been reduced by a factor of around 10, it was a factor of 30 for Belgium and 25 for France.

The USA has currently at around the same number as in 1900. The only major brewing nation where that's true.

Number of breweries 1898 - 2000

Country

1898

1899

1900

1998

1999

2000

UK

8,072

6,897

6,739

551

498

500

Brausteuergebiet

6,441

Bavaria

6,116

696

684

671

Wurtemburg

6,621

5,818

170

167

169

Belgium

3,143

3,118

3,223

112

113

Turkey

2

3

France

2,546

2,540

80

113

Russia

1,035

1,025

USA

2,390

2,412

total world

40,475

39,542

Sources:

Dundee Courier - Wednesday 13 September 1899, page 2.

Cheltenham Chronicle - Saturday 17 August 1901, page 7.

BBPA Statistical Handbook 2003, p. 92

The Beers of France

Het Brouwersblad June 2004. p.6

Deutscher Brauer-Bund, Bonn

Notes:

USA includes South America and Australia

I thought it would be interesting to look at average output per brewery. You can see that the breweries in the Brausteuergebiet - basically the North of Germany - operated on a larger scale than those in Bavaria and Württemberg.

But they still produced, on average, a third less than British breweries. To put the UK figures into context, around 4,700 of those breweries* were pub breweries making fewer than 1,000 barrels (1,600 hl) a year. Many of the breweries in Württemberg must have operated on a tiny scale.